writing
“Go ahead, touch it.” A bit squeamish but curiosity prevails. The surface feels smooth and almost rubbery. “Here, go under the skin,” he says. The fatty nodules slip between thumb and forefinger like fresh tapioca.[1]
“This is one of the girls you are writing about,” says 54-year-old Dr. Hernández Cárdenas gently in his halting English. “You can see how soft and pliable the tissue is. When we found her all that was left of her was a sheet of mummified leather—like in the photo I showed you.” “The one that looked like a blanket of beefy jerky?” “Tougher,” he replies. “You would never have known it belonged to someone human, let alone a 14-year-old girl. We estimate that she was killed about a year ago.”
Dr. Hernández Cárdenas is dressed in hospital scrubs, double facemask and gloves (a soothing powder blue color) scented with talcum powder. He crouches over a plastic tub filled with approximately one meter of human skin floating in a chemical solution of unknown provenance—Dr Cárdenas’s secret resurrection fluid.
Soft music filters through the chemical, faintly gamey white room where Cárdenas keeps his “Jacuzzi.” The latter is a large man-sized plexiglass aquarium that sits squarely in the middle. It stands empty now—unusual in a city morgue that used to receive 30 corpses a day.
It is a Thursday morning in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, at the Office of the Medical Examiner where Cárdenas, a forensic dentist is on the cusp of revolutionizing forensic science. His discovery? A solution that allows medical investigators to rehydrate mummified remains.
By reconstituting mummified tissue and halting the process of putrefaction, Cárdenas has been able to work with detectives and the medical examiner to firstly: identify victims—through fingerprints, visual recognition, tattoos, birthmarks and other physical features and secondly, to determine the cause of death. Rehydration allows pathologists to spot lesions, bruising or other traumatic soft tissue injuries that can only be assessed using Dr. Cárdenas’s technique. An unintended consequence?: A short stint in the “Jacuzzi” effectively embalms the victim at no cost to bereaved family members.
So successful is Cárdenas’s method, that close relatives have not only been able to identify their loved ones through facial recognition, but have also held open casket funerals. Moreover, rehydration can also determine whether trauma is new or older. The presence of older bruises inflicted over a period of time, points to the likelihood of domestic abuse and the probability that the killer is an intimate partner.
But today, Cárdenas is focusing on the other scourge that has been plaguing this city for two decades and the reason why he became interested in the rehydration of remains in the first place. “This,” he says sadly, holding up what appears to be a small pocket in the skin with a jagged empty circle in the middle of it, “Is the marks they left when they cut off her nipple and this,” he points to the area where the other breast should have been, “is where they cut off her other one.” Then he carefully lifts a cleanly cut edge where the victim’s shoulder once was, “and this is where they chopped off her arm.” The crescent-shaped puncture marks on the breast flap? “Bites,” he says cryptically.
Cárdenas is a small man of gentle humor whose face has settled into an expression of permanent sadness. Haunted in fact. It is if all of the ghosts of murdered and mutilated girls are crowding around in this hushed and tiny room, lamenting their truncated lives.
It is their unsolved murders, Cárdenas maintains, that pushed him to come up with a way to rehydrate so many unidentified Jane Does, nameless girls whose remains were discarded like so much trash in the empty lots and ditches surrounding the city’s perimeter. Their youth, poverty and the sadistic nature of their deaths obsessed him. “I used to take many girls to bed,” he told a New York Times reporter in 2012, “but not in the way you think.”[2]
***
They call it femicide
The Cristo Negro stands high on a hill above the city with his arms outstretched. It is hard to say whether the artist who designed the 15-meter “Black Christ” did so to succor or to supplicate—most likely both. For the city of over which the statue presides, is in critical need of both.
For this is ”Murder City”—aka Ciudad Juárez, Mexico—where the risk of an ugly and violent death is simply the price one pays for living here. Not only has this dusty border city earned a reputation of being among the most violent in the world, but it is also “ground zero” of Mexico’s femicide, which, since 1994, has swept this city like a contagion.
And like an epidemic, the violence has snaked outward from Juárez, to Chihuahua City, infecting Estados de Mexico (which includes part of the Federal District of Mexico), Vera Cruz, Sinaloa, Guerrero, Oaxaca, the southern states bordering Guatemala and Central America itself.
Today, Mexico is in the grips of a human security crisis that few living in the US or elsewhere even know about. Border cities such as Nogales and Nueva Laredo for example, are essentially war zones where cartels duke it out—among themselves, the military and other government-supported paramilitary groups—to gain control of the multi-billion dollar “narco corridors” into the US, the world’s largest consumer of illicit drugs.
To date, Mexico scores a lowly 72 out of 148 countries in the UNDP’s annual Gender Inequality Index, which pulls its overall human development score down to 61 out of 187 countries—despite the fact that it is no now longer designated a ‘developing’ country.[3] Although the nation has made considerable strides with respect to access to education for women and girls, maternal mortality and legislative representation (women hold 36 percent of all parliamentary seats), violence against women leapt sharply from 2006 to 2013—and in 2014 to 2015—even more sharply. According to all indications, this trend will likely continue.
Narco-violence, contend women human rights defenders, is no more than the symptom and not the cause. The roots of today’s crisis is imbedded deeply into the entrenchment of predatory male-bonded groups, and is fueled by concomitant national instability. Although many contend that the murder and widespread abuse of women by these gangs represent no more than “collateral” damage, the fact that women’s rights workers, the families of femicide victims, and those who dare write about these crimes are also specifically targeted speaks volumes about the need for unimpeded access to victims. That is, the males in these groups “need” women—or their abuse and death—to boost their status among their brothers. Sometimes this may take the form of a type of “narco-seraglio” to demonstrate power within the group.
Dr. Rosa Maria Salazar Rivera, the Director of Red Nacional De Refugios, a system of women’s shelters that are located in several, but not all of Mexico’s 32 states, says the more powerful narco-gang members “collect” women, imprison and impregnate them only to abandon them in safe houses scattered throughout the vast swathes of desert, forest, mountain and savannahs controlled by organized crime. “They assume rightly that their victims will choose to stay rather abandon their children or risk being tortured or killed,” says Salazar Rivera.[4] “For some obscure reason they seem to believe that acquiring as many women and children as possible and then abandoning them is somehow testimony to their sexual prowess—even where women (and girls) are taken by force.”
“The abandoned women are the lucky ones,” she adds, thoughtfully cocking her head to one side. “They are more likely to escape because their ‘husband’ has lost interest. You have to understand that this is not about love, its about capturing and imprisoning as many women as possible in order to enhance their status within the gang and with other narco groups.”
She cites one case of a young woman who managed to escape. When she was 19, her own mother sold her to a sicario, a for-hire assassin. By the time she found her way to the refugio, her mental health was so damaged she had to be institutionalized. She is still so traumatized, that she will likely be unable to testify anytime in the near future—if ever. “These women are treated in a way that is almost beyond the powers of the imagination,” says Salazar Rivera.
There are reasons, however, why Mexico and other Latin American countries have become killing fields for women. Quite apart from the more recent past that includes cycles of revolution followed by repression and the harnessing of foreign economic and military power to maintain that status quo, it is necessary to cast our gaze back in time to the Spanish conquest and even before. To examine how the culture of male impunity develops and then metastasizes in modern times, thereby unraveling the social fabric of the entire society, we must take a journey back in time to the Aztec Empire, when Mexican culture as we now know it was still in its infancy.
***
Cosmic Foes
To situate narco violence against women within the larger historical context however, it is necessary to understand the cultural dialectic of Machismo (power) versus Marianismo (submission). This dualistic interpretation of gender norms long precedes modern times; even in the pre-Columbian era, the diminution of the status of women and girls created a culture of militarization and the valorization of conquest and war. It is these woven strands of nationalism, militarization, predatory male-bonded gangs and misogyny that lead us to the present and explain to a large extent why modern day Mexico is what it is today.
When writing about pre-Conquest times it is tempting for historians to depict a gender utopia of “complementary” equality. However, this would be doing an injustice to what we now know. Although women enjoyed greater autonomy during the late Toltec periods and early years of Aztec rule, as the empire matured, the role of women became increasingly contradictory—though women were certainly valued, they were also seen as the cosmic antagonists of men. As Aztec society increasingly marginalized women and confined their influence to the domestic sphere, the empire became more martial, acquired more lands and consolidated its power through the use of military force.
The Aztec emphasis on the valorization of war and those who waged it affected women in two ways. First, the state increasingly used religion to demonize and diminish women in order to produce a warrior class that would unquestioningly follow orders and wage incessant, brutal war.
Second, because the preferred tribute was cloth and women its primary producers, in order to meet Tenochtitlan’s unquenchable thirst for textiles, the Aztecs allowed men living in conquered lands to take more than one wife. This, the victors hoped, would encourage men to force their wives to ramp up their production. It also, however, resulted in greater conflict within families, the lowering of the legal age of marriage for girls from 16 to younger and greater inequality within the home and society,[5] while also producing a class of men who would never form families, not unlike the bare branches of China.[6]
The Aztec people considered the female body itself, and more particularly the womb, as sacred: the dark, moist, earthy fount that, warmed by the male sun, bought forth life. But this is where the “complementary” status of women becomes contradictory: For from a cosmological, religious and spiritual point of view, the Aztec State actually considered women to be the enemies of men.[7]
Initially the Aztec empire had plenty of female religious role models to choose from. These include Cihuacoatl/Coatlicue, the earth goddess, who, much like the Hindu Kali, was also the goddess of both life and death. Four others were of particular importance to commoners.[8] These were: Chalchiuhtlicue, the goddess of lakes and rivers; Chicomecoatl, the maize goddess; Mayahuel, the maguey goddess; Huixtocihuatl, the goddess of salt; and Teteo innan/Toci, the goddess of healing; and Xochiquetzal, the goddess of sensuality, feasting, fine craftsmanship and sexual pleasure.[9] These occupied the personal, spiritual, natural, medical and sexual spheres of the Aztec cosmology.
But this vision of divine complementary equality was to change under the Aztecs who perhaps were, as David Carrasco writes, “plagued by a sense of illegitimacy and cultural inferiority.”[10] As relative newcomers to the sophisticated and more female-friendly civilization of the Toltecs that preceded them, they arrived from the north first as despised newcomers, then clawed their way up to the status of warrior class and later, with the help of a series of strategic marital alliances, arose as the titular power in Mesoamerica.
As Elizabeth M. Brumfiel writes in Aztec Women: Capable Partners and Cosmic Enemies, the Aztec State began to promulgate a religion that was a very different animal from everyday devotional practices. Its rulers, priests and warrior castes emphasized a mythology, ritual and art that defined a strict gender hierarchy that, in debasing women, promoted the supremacy of war. Indeed, by the time Hernan Cortes arrived on Mexico’s shores, Aztec society had become increasingly bellicose, with an emphasis on conquering more territory and exacting as much tribute from vassal states by force of arms as possible—usually in the form of cloth, slaves and sacrificial victims.
Four key male deities were advanced as protectors of the Aztec Empire: Huitzilopochtli, Tlaloc, Tezcatlipoca, Quetzalcoatl, and Xipe Totec. Of these it was Huitzilopochtli, the God of War, who came to prominence at the height of Aztec power. His relationship to the goddesses of the pantheon is of particular interest in the context of Mexico’s femicides. History defines the present—even with respect to who will be singled out for murder and how their killers choose to dispatch them. Thus the signature of Mexico’s current femicides were first writ on the bodies of their Aztec goddesses.
A number of commentators describe the myth of Huitzilopochtli as a cosmological projection of both the fear of female power and its repression. In the myth, Huitzilopochtli was conceived while his earth-goddess mother performed devotions at a shrine at the top Coatepec, the axis mundi of the Aztec world—otherwise known as “the naval of the world” and the intersection between the corporeal and incorporeal realms. But the goddess’ pregnancy shamed her daughter Coyolxauhqui, who believed her mother to be—at least according to the ‘new’ Aztec interpretation—little more than a celestial strumpet. She and her brothers, the stars, plotted to kill the Earth Goddess.[11]
When the band of cosmic conspirators reached the summit, to their great surprise, Huitzilopochti sprung fully adult and fully armed from his mother’s womb. He hacked his sister to death and tossed her decapitated head, arms, legs and limbless torso down the mountain where they eventually came to rest at the base.
Huitzilopochtli then attacked the stars and they scattered across the firmament leaving the newly hatched Solar God, “in uncontested possession of the celestial field.”[12] Grieving, Coatlicue tearfully gathered up her warrior daughter’s severed head and placed it in the night sky among her starry sons. Coyolxauhqui was now a Moon Goddess. Nevertheless, the defeat of the female Coyolxauhqui at the hands of the male Huitzilopochtli symbolized not only “the primordial victory of light and cosmic order over darkness and chaos”—a drama repeated each morning with the banishment of the death’s head Moon Goddess by the burning light of the solar God—but the supremacy of men, especially warriors, over women.
Aztec rulers devised such narratives to construct state power and create an uncontested army by promoting the strength and bravery of male warriors at the expense of women and so called “female” tendencies towards non-violence. Women were disrupters of cosmic harmony and therefore enemies of the Aztec State: death and dismemberment was therefore completely justified. According to Brumfiel, the two best-known extant pieces of Aztec state-sponsored art were monumental sculptures of the goddesses Coatlicue and Coyolxauhqui—both depicted “as victims of celestial male violence.”[13]
With this deep cultural context in mind, the link between impunity for the debasement and harm of women and broader male use of violence on a societal and inter-societal level finds a downstream echo in contemporary femicide in the Mexican context. For example, the dismemberment of the Moon goddess closely mirrors salient features of the Mexican femicide where dismemberment and decapitation are common.
As Jane Caputi notes in her excellent essay Goddess Murder and Gynocide in Ciudad Juárez, dismembering a woman also effectively “dis-articulates” her.[14] It renders her voiceless and helpless. It neutralizes and reduces her to no more than random body parts. It obliterates her very identity and thus erases her as a human being. That asphyxiation is a favored mode of dispatch for femicidaires is also emblematic of the need to silence, to choke off the feminine. As the criminologist and psychologist Oscar Maynaz notes, every strangulation involving a woman is invariably accompanied by sexual violence.[15]
The stories of Coatlicue and Coyolxauhqui also echo other ritualistic aspects of femicide: i.e. the removal of eyes, breast mutilations and injuries to the genitals. One does not, Caputi points out, have to be a priest to conduct blood sacrifice.[16] Writes Caputi: “The murders of women and girls in Juárez are crimes, but at the same time, can be understood as patriarchal sacrificial rituals.”[17]
***
The Conquest of Femininity
Armed with their bibles and deploying arms to force belief in the holy trinity of the father, the son and the holy ghost, the arrival of the Spaniards effectively meant an all out attack on the Amerindian feminine and masculine—and resulted in the snuffing out of one of the most advanced, but also the most militaristic, clusters of civilizations in the entire world. Nevertheless, the cult of male superiority and male impunity to harm women has persisted across the centuries, making Mexican society a dangerous landscape through which its modern-day daughters must navigate.
For example, domestic abuse in Mexico is rampant, with over two-thirds of Mexican women reporting violence from their intimate partners.[18] With little in the way of public or prosecutorial support, women stay silent for fear of even greater retribution. This contributes to the escalation of domestic violence as it becomes ‘normalized,’ with younger household members taking on the gendered roles of perpetrator (if male) and victim (if female). Boys witness violence and identify with the perpetrator and learn that it is okay to use violence to resolve disputes, while girls identify with the victim and learn that male familial hegemony is just the ‘way things are.’ The mother is usually depressed, frequently sick and can’t effectively parent.
Outside of the home, the world becomes a dystopic killing field, where no woman or girl child can be safe. Large groups of disenfranchised and unemployed youth learn that it is easier and far more lucrative to join criminal gangs than to break their backs for $4 per day. More women are working outside of the home, but usually in ill-paid insecure jobs that men feel entitled to despite the fact that they might not necessarily even want them. Resentment builds. Girls and young women begin to disappear only to turn up dead or dismembered, bearing marks of unspeakable torture.
Already weary to the bone, mothers fear for their daughters and try to protect them by accompanying them to-and-from school, which in turn impairs their ability to provide, to have a life outside of fear. When their daughters disappear or are found dead, their mothers (and fathers) must then make the rounds of police stations, prosecutors offices, refugios and undertake their own investigation to determine either who killed or abducted their daughters. Many lose their jobs owing to absenteeism, further plunging their families into poverty.
As the social fabric woven by Mexican women unravels because of the violence perpetrated against them with impunity, the broader climate of violence within the state escalates. As we have seen in West Africa, this is a predictable syndrome: when men attack the weavers of life, the door is opened for even greater levels and intensities of violence. Women fear leaving the house knowing they will be blamed for whatever happens to them. They cannot organize, or if they do, they are eventually forced to leave or are killed. To date, Mexico has the highest rate of assassinations of women’s human rights workers in the world.[19]
Those who survive their ordeal are often left destitute when their husbands abandon them. In Mexico, rape is considered a blot on male honor and the responsibility of the victim and not the perpetrators—who earn their acceptance into male-bonded gangs through acts of extreme violence against women and girls.
In 2006 then-President Felipe Calderón declared his government and that of the US would join forces to wage a ‘war on drugs.’ When he mobilized and deployed Mexico’s armed forces into the border areas and other contested regions, overall homicides spiked. Since 2006, more than 75,000 have died and more than 26,000 have gone missing; a total of 100,000 and counting.[20]
The murders of women however, bore distinctive features that differentiated them from ‘typical’ narco-related violence, whether perpetrated at the hands of the military, the traffickers or those uniformed forces in the pay of the drug lords. Observers note that murders of women differed from those of men by virtue of the sexual abuse, sadism and ‘overkill’ visited upon their bodies. As we have seen, the cultural roots of the linkage between sadism towards women and militarism run very deep in Mexican culture.
The state, while ostensibly fighting the narco-gangs, actually feeds the “coal mine” by offering de facto impunity for femicide to all male perpetrators, whether they be soldiers or drug lords.
The extent to which authorities first dismiss, humiliate, and then threaten victim’s families, in addition to the brutality with which they then persecuted, disappeared, and even murdered grieving families, is remarkable. In the case of the Juárez femicides, police and authorities lost suppressed or contaminated evidence. Family members were harassed, treated with contempt and in a number of cases even killed.[21] It is hard not to see this as state support of male impunity for crimes committed against women.
Indeed, in most of the pre-2010 cases, it appears that police were either among the perpetrators or acting in concert with powerful business interests.[22] Paramilitary groups, narcos and the police also targeted women’s rights activists, journalists and human rights workers who dared speak out—testimony to the degree to which authorities/drugs traffickers are threatened by women’s and human rights activists.
“There is a rule in criminology: if crimes go unpunished, crime increases.”
“The state essentially permitted women to be murdered,” observes Oscar Maynaz, a fit, boyish looking 47-year-old who is former Chief of Forensics for Chihuahua State. Maynaz now teaches criminology and psychology at the University of El Paso while moonlighting as a realtor on the side. “They refused to investigate and instead tortured innocent people and forced them to confess. Thus, they effectively allowed these horrible killings to continue—as they are continuing to do to this very day.”[23]
***
Ground Zero
Not so long ago, criminologists dubbed Ciudad Juárez the murder capital of the entire world. Four years later, the city no longer lives up to its former infamy: From 2011 to the present, crime rates have been tumbling—fully 75 percent from the all time high of 252 per 100,000 in 2010.[24] Despite this relative lull, Ciudad Juárez, still struggles with its reputation as the violent stepsister of El Paso, Texas, the tidy American city with which it shares a border.
The unflattering comparison is clearly evident. Once across the bridge that spans the greasy trickle that used to be the Rio Grande, the wide boulevards of El Paso give way to a tattier Mexican version of the former’s soulless banelieu. The contrast between the two cities couldn’t be more stark: For three years running pundits have honored the former with the moniker “the safest city” in the entire United States. Indeed, the relative lack of spillover violence from Mexico into the US has served as a justification for turning a blind eye to the unraveling taking place right across the border.[25]
But Juárez is no El Paso. At the height of the ‘drug wars’ between 2009 and 2011 more than 20 to 30 bodies were appearing in the city’s morgue every single day. So extreme was the carnage that the medical examiner actually ran out of body bags and had to beg the US Government to provide them with more.[26]
These days, the tourists who used to flood into the Centro Historico looking for a quick, cheap foray into the vida loca, are now mostly gone: The $5 hookers are so desperate for business they are willing to negotiate down to one or two dollars; while the nightclubs and low-end beer halls that squat along its inky streets are largely silent or closed down. Junkies loiter where tourists used to lounge. No more do the soldiers from Fort Bliss cross the border for some low-end R&R.
Once past the Centro, the traffic circles and glass office buildings give way to empty lots, strip malls filled with big box stores and football field-sized parking lots. And then surrounding them like a vast sea of dusty beige, a seemingly limitless stretch of desert interrupted by dusty colonías.
These neighborhoods extend far out into the desert—some made up of thousands of tiny but neat homes, while others are more informal affairs of makeshift dwellings cobbled together out of whatever building materials are at hand: corrugated iron, cinder blocks, bits of plywood, brick and wood. Many of the inhabitants rely on electricity pilfered from the main line while older neighborhoods such as Anapra, now boast paved roads, for-profit fresh water stations, street lighting and other infrastructure that indicate that the informal is slowly becoming formalized.
Closer to town, near the border and in special zones around the city, empty lots filled with thin plastic bags give way to the heavily manicured facades and spotless exteriors of the maquiladoras—those monuments to corporate efficiency, and the brave new world of the laissez-faire capitalist city state.
Maquilas have made what Juárez what it is today—a thriving “free trade zone” where transnational companies pay workers a pittance of what they would pay a US worker—free of the obligation of benefits, sick days, maternity leave or environmental considerations. It is also these that make Juárez what it is: A draw for poor migrants from throughout Mexico and Central America. Almost all of them are looking for work, a new beginning and a chance at something resembling the putative comforts of those who reside in El Norte, that mythical beacon of hope known as America.
It is against the background of this tale of two cities—one wealthy, the other dirt poor—that first handfuls, and then dozens, and then hundreds of poor, mostly indigenous women began to disappear. Although many now believe that a serial killer, or group of serial killers, were operating in Juárez long before 1994, it wasn’t until then that various NGOs, collectives of mourning mothers and human rights groups began to raise the alarm over the fact that women—many of them no more than adolescents—were disappearing only to turn up weeks, sometimes months, and even years, later.
All showed up dead: discarded like so much garbage in the bleak expanses surrounding Juárez or in the empty lots that pockmark the city. Rumors circulated of left breasts severed, right nipples bitten off and their broken bodies showing clear signs of almost unimaginable torture. The El Paso-based journalist Diana Washington Valdez quoted un-named forensic experts who told her that many of the victim’s necks were broken, and speculated that this was done to heighten the intensity of the rapist’s orgasm as his victim’s body convulsed in death.[27] As the death toll mounted and the lurid tales of rape and torture spread, news outlets in North America and Europe began to take up the story.
Initially at least, many of the victims were young factory workers between the ages of 12 and 28 who often disappeared either heading to, or returning from, work. Known as maquiladoras—maquilas for short—these factories first began to proliferate along the border in the late 1960s when the government designated Juárez as a free-trade zone. After the ratification of the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the numbers of these factories exploded as transnational corporations pulled up their stakes and relocated to Mexico from the US, Canada, Europe and Japan.
The trade treaty also allowed for the dumping of cheaply produced US corn onto the Mexican market. Unable to compete, hundreds of thousands of newly impoverished campesinos and campesinas were forced to sell their land—usually to large multi-nationals jockeying to gain control of the mining and agribusiness sector—and headed north to the maquila zone. Labor was cheap, environmental controls almost nonexistent and unions scarcer still.
***
Little Indigenous Girls from the South
Maquiladoras operate on a 24-hour-clock with the average shift, 12 hours or so. The work itself—assembling circuit boards for electronics etc.—is numbingly tedious but nevertheless requires speed, concentration and manual dexterity. Factories overwhelmingly preferred to hire young females because recruiters believed they were not only faster and more nimble, but that their youth and gender made them more docile workers less likely to organize and demand higher wages and benefits. Human rights violations were common.
Workers were forced to take pregnancy tests, some were required to even show their supervisors used tampons to prove they were not pregnant, while sexual harassment by the bosses (invariably men) were commonplace.[28] In those days, maquila owners were also none too picky about the ages of those they hired. In Mexico it is relatively simple and cheap to obtain knock-off ID. A number of the murdered ‘women’ were not women at all but mere girls under the age of 12.
Paradoxically however, and despite the long hours and low pay (an average of $4 per-day), for many immigrant women the maquiladoras offered an opportunity to support themselves—often for the very first time. This upending of traditional Mexican gender norms was to have lethal consequences for the women of Juárez.
Known colloquially locally as “las inditas del sur” (the little indigenous girls from the south of Mexico) the victims were by no means, as the term suggests, a homogenous group—nor were the bulk of them maquila workers. While many were indeed from the south and had accompanied their families in search of work and opportunity, still others had been born in Juárez and were light skinned. What they all shared in common however, was youth, poverty and the fact that they were female.
Such was the demand for cheap labor that the city could not absorb the new arrivals who flocked there in search of work. Almost overnight, entire communities sprouted up on the periphery of the city. Young female workers were forced to traverse empty unlit lots as they made their way to and from work early in the morning and late at night. Many were picked off in this manner while still others disappeared in broad daylight in the Centro while transferring from one bus to another.
Mexico-city based Reforma columnist Sergio Rodriguez-Gonzalez has followed the events in Juárez for more than 20 years. His 2012 book, The Femicide Machine, is a stinging rebuke of Mexico and corporate America’s failure to act and is one of the most eloquent accounts of the femicide that has yet been written. It is also an indictment of ‘machismo’—that savage interpretation of masculinity which valorizes force, militarism and unfettered capitalism at the expense of women, girls and all of those activists, journalists, indigenous populations and the very poor who for whatever reason find themselves on the receiving end of narco- and state-sponsored terror.
Considered one of Mexico’s most fearless reporters, Rodriguez-Gonzalez has received death threats, been beaten up so severely that he had to be hospitalized and has, on occasion, been forced into hiding. A small man with a nose squashed to one side and large expressive eyes, Rodriguez-Gonzalez does not appear at all nervous but has every right to be. According to Freedom House, Mexico is one of the most dangerous countries in the world to be a journalist. More than 82 have been murdered since 2000 and many dozens more have been ‘disappeared.’[29]
“Femicide is the ultimate expression of masculine power,” says Rodriguez-Gonzalez over a coffee at a comfortable bookstore café in the Reforma District of Mexico City. “It is expression of the supremacy of the masculinity. They [the perpetrators] use femicide as a bonding mechanism. Girls and women are kidnapped in the city and on the roads and highways to satisfy the male sexuality of the men in power.”[30]
According to Rodriguez-Gonzalez and many other observers, the unique confluence of social, political and economic changes that took place in Juárez during the early 1990s contributed to what was to become a “killing field of women”—one that would eventually extend throughout Central America and into Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.
In Juárez the large-scale drive to employ young women meant many became the primary breadwinners. Suddenly they had money to spend— on their families, on their children, to see a doctor—and more importantly, to enjoy an economic agency hitherto denied to them. Maquiladora’s hired young women by the thousands thereby—as Rodriguez states in the Femicide Machine— “unleashing male hatred.”
“They [men] felt replaced,” he says. “Even though few men wanted these jobs, they didn’t want women to have them either. These were jobs that women could do that men couldn’t. They began to resent these girls and women even though their wages were barely enough to meet basic needs.”[31]
This resentment bubbled up in several ways. One was the creation of a new “type” of female stereotype: the maqui loca. A woman who, according to the prevailing stereotype, worked all day, dressed in sexy clothing, and hung out in nightclubs. The inference of course is that the maqui loca is a woman who is “asking for it”; a woman who deserves to be raped; a woman who deserves to be murdered; a woman who is quite literally trash.
“This was a very real situation in Juárez,” Rodriguez-Gonzalez notes. “Many of them [the victims} were very young girls, out on the street and on their way to work. The presence of so many women on the streets is a threat to a man. It violated the norms that most men had grown up with and they resented that women were being hired for jobs that they felt entitled to but didn’t even necessarily want.”[32]
He also notes that Juárez was also one of the “very first experiments in globalization” where workers were reduced to mere cogs and females in particular, as disposable objects that could simply be tossed aside. The fact that males resented women exercising the must rudimentary form of independence speaks volumes about the degree to which contempt, fear and hatred of women has infected 21st century Mexico. “A woman as both a citizen and employee is the subject of misogyny and violence,” Rodriguez-Gonzalez asserts. “After so many decades of looking at women as objects that can be thrown away, it has now become normal.”[33]
Consensus about who is doing the killing however, remains elusive. It appears as though at least some of the killers are using the general impunity to rub out their girlfriends, wives and other family members. Still others targeted young women or girls whom they presumably did not know. Most of the victims, police insisted, were victims of domestic violence—or had ties to drugs trafficking. According to prevailing Mexican norms, both offer a justification for murder. Police and paramilitary units are also accused of preying upon women. Despite this national context of impunity, the killings of young pretty girls continued to elicit the greatest international attention.
***
International Outcry
In 2002, Lourdes Portillo released her searing but also lyrical documentary Senorita Extraviada, which went on to garner both accolades and awards. By 2004, Jane Fonda, Sally Field and numerous other celebrities joined Eve Ensler’s V-Day to protest the killings.
Marches and protests notwithstanding, the disappearances and murders continued. The situation only worsened in 2008 with the assassination in broad day light of grieving-parent-turned-activist Mariesela Ortiz and the mutilation rape murder of poet and women’s rights activist Susana Chavez whose anguished “Ni una mas” became the call to action for an entire city. Police continued to make arrests but allegations of torture effectively tainted the ‘confessions’ of suspects while further exacerbating the already seriously tarnished reputation of the Fiscalía and the police.
The outrage grew and so too did international pressure. During the intervening years—between 2001 and 2013—the missing women of Juárez became, what journalist Charles Bowden dryly refers to as, “a cottage industry.” Numerous books, essays, at least 20 online documentaries, a Hollywood feature film (starring Jennifer Lopez) and endless academic treatises have examined everything from the character of the murders themselves, to the larger socio-economic context in which they took place—the North American Free Trade Act (NAFTA), the corporatization and securitization of the border, globalization, narco-trafficking, militarization, urbanization and even the production of cultural artifacts to commemorate (and some would say exploit) the lives of the missing and murdered women and girls.
Even global cosmetics giant Mac, along with its Mexican partner the fashion house Rodarte, got in on the act when they began promoting the “Juárez” line. According to a fashion blog in the L. A. Times, their ads, which featured cadaverous looking young models with their eyes rimmed in “the colors of the desert” were “inspired by the idea of workers in Mexican maquiladoras walking half-asleep to the factories in Juárez, after dressing in the dark.”[34]
Needless to say, not all of the dead bore the marks of their sojourn into the hereafter. In many cases only bones and bits of discarded clothing were all that remained of the dozens—and even hundreds according to some activists—of women both young and old whose corpses were eventually swallowed by the desert. Still authorities insisted that the victims were prostitutes, involved in the drugs trade or ‘bad girls’ who hung out in clubs. New reports quoting police sources referenced high heels and mini-skirts, suggesting the way victims dressed with how they were killed.
In El Silencio que la vos de todos quiebra: Mujeres y victimas de Ciudad Juárez, a book that Mexican authorities subsequently banned—ostensibly for divulging details of the investigation that authorities wanted to suppress—the authors revealed that 74% of the first 137 bodies found intact and still clothed were wearing long pants, 10% were wearing long skirts or dresses and only 16% were wearing miniskirts.[35] A common denominator in all of their deaths however, was the brutality visited on their bodies and, the reaction of officials—which in almost all cases was accompanied by snide remarks about ‘revealing’ clothing, derision, character assassination, indifference and in a number cases, intimidation and violence.
The many ways that police, state, municipal and federal authorities blocked, botched and bungled the investigation has been widely chronicled elsewhere.[36] What is clear however, is that despite endless press, demonstrations, United Nations, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and other INGO reports, the Juárez femicides represent one of the longest killing sprees in the history of North America.
***
The Inter-American Court Weighs In
Activists and victim’s families however, received an unexpected boost in December 2010. In what was to be a ‘watershed moment’ for the bereaved families of Juárez, the Inter-American Court handed down a verdict against Chihuahua State in the Campo Algonodero or “Cotton field Case.”
In its judgment, the Court ruled that Mexican authorities had failed to adequately investigate the murders of Claudia Ivette Gonzalez, 17, Irma Monreal Herrera, 15 and Laura Berenice Ramos, 20: three of the eight young women whose bodies were discovered in 2001 discarded in an empty lot across the street from the Association of Maquiladoras in Central Juárez. The authors of the 167-page judgment also noted that authorities had failed to protect victims and had harassed and intimidated family members.
In a case “without precedent,” the court also ruled that the State of Chihuahua publicly acknowledge responsibility, publish the sentence in official government records and build a monument to commemorate the victims. More critically still, the court charged authorities to investigate the killings and bring those responsible to justice.[37]
The ruling was significant for a number of reasons—but chief among them was the fact that it recognized, for the very first time, the gendered nature of the killings of women: i.e. that victims were targeted for no other reason than they were female. It also implicitly acknowledged the gendered nature of the investigation or rather, its misogynistic bias. The very same week of that the court handed down its ruling, seven more women were murdered in Juárez.[38]
Nevertheless, although activists charge that many of the recommendations of the Inter-American Court have yet to be met, the State of Chihuahua has made some small but significant improvements.
***
A Few Small Steps
It is a Monday morning Ciudad Juárez’s Vocer de la Fiscalía Especializada en Atencion a Mujeres Victimas del Delito Por Razones De Genero—the Women’s Justice Centre for short. The building is brand new—one of two in Chihuahua State—and is the first of its kind in all of Mexico.
Inside the main doors, which are papered with posters of missing girls and women, is a waiting room. The benches are filled with women and children. The women look tired and dejected, the children rambunctious and the staff cheerful but solicitous. The United States paid for the Women’s Justice Center, which opened in 2012 while Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State, and by all appearances, considerable resources are concentrated here.[39]
Sylvia Najero Robledo is the Director of the Centre. She is brisk, with smiling eyes and exudes cheery efficiency. She is wearing a bright pink hoodie—the color of both commemoration and women’s activism in this part of the world. This building, she says, as she trots quickly along the shining white hallway and waves towards a series of closed offices, houses the special office for victim’s families and violence against women.
The Center was established to investigate the murders and disappearances of women and to apply international protocols as per the recommendations of the Inter-American court. Gone are the days, insists Robledo, when police simply took a few photographs, dumped, mislaid or contaminated evidence, and then simply ‘lost’ the files.
“We now apply the protocols to each case,” she says moving with great speed down the gleaming hallways and pausing in front of a series of ‘intake’ rooms. “Before, when a woman faced domestic abuse, was raped, or her daughter disappeared or was killed she had to go from one building to another.” This, she adds, was particularly hard on poor women who wasted a tremendous amount of time traveling from one government centre to another, missed work and were often fired for absenteeism. “Now they can simply come to the centre and receive all of the government support in one place.”
The center focuses on five main areas: Missing girls/women; gender-based homicide; domestic violence: sexual violence and child support. In order to grapple with Mexico’s burgeoning sex trafficking problem, authorities are also planning to add a trafficking section. Thus far however, the Mexican Congress is lagging when it comes to establishing effective, coherent, and enforceable laws against the kidnapping and sale of human beings—most of whom are children and young women press-ganged into the sex trade.
It also tracks the numbers of women murdered, the circumstances of the death, and categorizes them according to whether they are drug-related, bystander deaths (as in the collateral casualties of a drive by shooting for example) intimate partner, family violence or a ‘stranger’ killing. In order to be classified as a femicide, a murder has to fulfill certain criteria—i.e. evidence of sexual assault, intimate partner violence, mutilation and overkill.
In addition to providing forensic medical services (i.e. the collection of rape kits), the centre offers victims and families counseling services, financial and legal assistance. What it doesn’t offer however, is prevention services focusing on perpetrators, nor, do critics allege, does it keep accurate statistics. This latter is a contentious issue throughout Mexico where law enforcement agencies are notoriously lax when it comes to keeping tabs on violent crimes.
Robledo is firm. “In the past that may have been the case but no more,” she asserts. “Our numbers are the most accurate reflection on what is actually occurring here in Juárez and yes, the number of femicides are fewer and most of the girls who disappear we’ve been able to locate.”
Not so, contends Irma Casas, Director of Casa Amiga, the first women’s shelter in Mexico and the successor of its indomitable founder Esther Cano Chavez who died in 2011. Casa Amiga also tracks the numbers of disappearances and killings, but it statistics are based on the local media’s daily tally of the city’s dead.
“From 2008 onwards there was an increase in the number of murdered women,” says Casas. “The fact is that the authorities decided to re-categorize many of these murders in the narco category. Most of these cases were never even investigated.”
Although access and the quality of victim services has improved, Casas insists that the authorities are still far too reluctant to actually investigate and prosecute the murders of females—particularly those involving young women whose deaths appear to be unrelated to family violence or drugs trafficking.
“They have good intentions at the Fiscalía but they are working according to an old model,” she says. “They are also working within the system—because they have no other choice. The detectives and the pathologists—may be new, and many are highly dedicated professionals, but their leaders have been in charge for 25 years. They are part of the old system that covered up the murders and aided and abetted the perpetrators. They contaminate any possibility of finding out who is undertaking these heinous crimes.”
Julia Fragosa-Monarrez, a professor and investigator with El Colegio de la Frontera Norte agrees. “The lack of accurate data only adds to the confusion concerning how many women and girls have been murdered or are missing,” she says.
“The government has accomplished some of the resolution but the most important is justice for both the victims and the families and that is still missing,” Fragosa-Monarrez adds. “When you don’t have justice in a city like Juárez then you basically are encouraging and facilitating killers to abduct, mutilate and kill women—and then dump their bodies in the desert or in empty lots.”
“It puts more pressure on already stressed families to take care of their young daughters because they are afraid they will be abducted and killed.”
Rodrigo Caballero Rodriguez could be considered part of the ‘old school.’ He is Coordinador de la Unidad de Investigación de Mujeres por Razones de Genero de la Fiscalía Especializada en la Mujer and he’s been at it a long time—first as a detective and then as a public prosecutor beginning in 2005.
Caballero Rodriguez is a big man and squeezes into his chair with some difficulty. Like everyone else who works at the Fiscalía, his office is modestly decorated—with portraits of Latin American revolutionaries Che, Zapata, Zapata, Juárez, Villa—and a lone photo of that father of passive resistance, Mahatma Gandhi.
He is proud of his office’s accomplishments. “Since 2005 we’ve had a policy of non-torture,” he says after questioned about the Mexican police habit of extracting confessions by violent means. Caballero Rodriguez also maintains that police now receive gender sensitivity training, and are working more closely with forensics to identify and charge perpetrators based on solid physical evidence.
“Police no longer contaminate crime scenes,” he declares—noting that hundreds of “corrupt” police officers were fired in the wake of the Inter-American Court ruling. The American government and authorities in El Paso have also played a critical role in “building the capacity” of the Fiscalía to investigate and punish killers of women and girls, he adds, which has also led to the hiring of more educated and skilled investigators and prosecutors, an enhanced understanding of the gender dimensions of crime, a new ‘fast track’ court for those accused of femicide, and the successful prosecution of cold cases. The US government has played a positive role in this respect, financing many of these training programs, and attempting to inculcate better standards of law enforcement. Nevertheless, the fact that most of the arms seized by the cartels originate in the US is a major cause for concern, as is the fact that US training may enable Mexican soldiers to become formidable drug lords themselves if they so choose; but more on that later.
***
Femicide laws: A License to Kill?
When the Inter-American Court handed down its judgment in the Cotton field Case hopes were high that it signaled an end to impunity for the murderers of women and girls. The government of Chihuahua responded first by stonewalling—tacitly admitting it didn’t have the capacity to “receive” the sentence and then owing to national and international outcry, slowly implementing a number, but not all of the reforms outlined in the judgment.
But even before then, in 2007, the Mexican Congress, under pressure from national and international human rights groups, various UN agencies and other governments, adopted a new legal framework to ensure the right of women to live free from violence and discrimination as enshrined in the General Law of Access for Women to a Life Free of Violence GLAWLFV). Among other issues, it sought to address the alarming rise of violence against women exemplified in its most extreme form as the crime of femicide.
The GLAWLFV also establishes the State’s duty to guarantee the security and integrity of victims through two main mechanisms: protection orders to ensure immediate police and judicial intervention in cases of family violence and/or rape And: the Declaration of Gender Violence.
This latter is a set of government emergency actions designed to address and eradicate femicides in a given territory, whether exercised by individuals or by the community. These include, but are not limited to, the issuing of an “Alba Alert,” the Mexican equivalent of an “Amber Alert,” the prioritization of crimes involving sexual assault and other gender-related crimes, and the provision of protection orders against violent partners, spouses or other family members.[40]
Initially at least, critics lauded these new developments as a step in the right direction, but it quickly became apparent that the new legislation had no teeth; that it left Mexico’s 32 to states with too many discretionary judicial loopholes; and that it neglected provide a roadmap concerning how the GLAWLFV was to be implemented.
To date, only 26 states have legislated the three types of protection orders. In 25 states regulatory frameworks stipulate that protection orders be requested before a ‘competent authority’ but do not indicate what those are or how they will be coordinated. Twenty states give a maximum duration of 72 hours before a protection order comes into effect—more than enough time, critics contend, to put the lives of women who seek restraining orders at risk.
Although a slew of new femicide laws have now taken effect in 13 out of Mexico’s 32 states, critics charge that they have done little to halt the murders and disappearances, which, if anything, have accelerated.[41] Although these laws acknowledge that the murders of women are driven by misogyny and therefore constitute a hate crime and thus should draw longer prison sentences, in fact, critics say they may be contributing to even greater impunity.
“The problem,” says Rodriguez-Gonzalez, “Is that the new laws actually grant judges greater discretion when it comes to passing sentences. In a country such as ours, where the judiciary is not independent this constitutes a huge problem.” His view is echoed by other women’s and human right activists who charge that if anything, the various state laws (femicide is not a capital offence) allow more wiggle room and even greater discretion on the part of the judge to interpret the law.
Moreover, if prosecutors cannot convince the judge that there is an element of hatred involved, then the accused is acquitted. Unlike Guatemala for example, the court cannot convict on the lesser charge of homicide. Prosecutors must prove that the crime meets the burden of proof to convict for femicide—or feminicidio as it is called in Mexico—which carries a higher penalty. This may not make much sense— but when it comes to jurisprudence and violence against women in Mexico little does.
Alicia Elena Pérez Duarte y Noroña, a former special prosecutor in Mexico City for crimes against women, insists that many judges do not consider the rape, torture and killings of little girls and women as sufficient proof of hatred. “In Mexico hate is considered a ‘feeling’ and hence not something that one can prove,” she says. “Even if there is mutilation and extreme cruelty, a defendant has only to insist he didn’t ‘hate’ the victim to be cleared of a femicide charge. Confusion over the definition of what constitutes a femicide moreover, is making it easier for the state to avoid prosecuting crimes against women.”[42]
She cites a case in Quintana Roo, a state in the south of the country, where the General Attorney flatly refused to use the law to convict a man charged with murdering a five-year-old girl. “He simply said, ‘I don’t like this law. I am not going to use it.’ The application of the role is completely discretionary and therefore susceptible to the prejudices and misogyny of prosecutors.” The problem, contends Duarte y Noroña, is that the judiciary is slow to change and the government has done little to educate state authorities about the law and how it can be applied. Too often judges do what they have always done and indeed facilitate impunity—and most particularly when the perpetrators are in uniform.
According to Duarte y Noroña, Casas and others, even if applied with an even hand, the new laws are riddled with inconsistencies. A lack of capacity also means that the authorities and the judiciary are insufficiently educated about gender issues to apply the law in a more balanced fashion.
In addition to being directly implicated in the murders of women, police, the military and other investigating authorities are so notoriously corrupt that few Mexicans have faith in their ability to solve violent crimes let alone prosecute them through to conviction. Once identified as a killer, it is fairly easy for a perpetrator to bribe the police and judiciary—particularly if he/they are wealthy and well connected. Although figures are next to non-existent, activists maintain that a good proportion—an estimated 10 to 15 percent—of rapes and other crimes of violence against women can be laid squarely at the door of the military and the federal and municipal police.
“The government tacitly acknowledged this ‘truth,’”[43] Pérez Duarte y Noroña says: when the Inter-American court handed down its judgment in the cotton field case, the government initially rejected the judgment outright.
***
The Disappeared
From a distance, the Pan-American high way looks like no more than a thin thread describing a straight line from north to south. The desert that encircles it is festooned with thousands of thin cheap plastic bags that look, from the road like desiccated jellyfish abloom in an ocean of ochre. As the colonías of Ciudad Juárez recede, so too do the man-made jellyfish. Eventually the desert becomes itself again—an astringent expanse encircled by barren mountains that march off into a dusty horizon.
Far off, on the edge of sight, a somber knot of six figures can be spotted heading due south. All are on foot. A slowly moving motorcade of municipal and state police officers accompanies the marchers. As one nears closer, heat waves emanating from the asphalt transform the small figures into indeterminate pink and black blobs before collapsing and re-coalescing into human form.
Only occasionally does a passing motorist honk a horn or wave, but aside from this most intermittent of encouragement, the marchers struggle grimly on. “In Chihuahua State, the greatest crime is to be young, female and pretty.” Riccardo Esparza wipes the perspiration from his round kindly face. He is in his late 40’s, overweight and leans on a red cane.
Like the other marchers, Esparza is wearing a pink placard draped over the front and back of his body. On it is a photo of his young daughter, Monica, only 18 when she disappeared two years ago. She peers impishly from his back and her coy and playful expression belies a fate almost too terrible to contemplate. Inscribed below her picture is her birth date and the day, month and year when she was last seen alive.
All of the other marchers are wearing identical placards, with similar black and white images of pretty young women—adolescents really. Their aim is to walk the 360 kilometers to Chihuahua City, the State Capital, to deliver a petition and demand that the Government do something about what international NGOs, the United Nations, the Inter-American Court, numerous celebrities, authors and victim’s groups have been clamoring about for decades now: To put an end to the impunity and bungled investigations that has made Chihuahua State, and in particular Ciudad Juárez, infamous not only as a killing field for women, but also a place where they simply disappear.
Later on at their home in a middle-class colonía a few dusty kilometers from the centre of town, Esparza and his weary-looking 57-year-old wife Olga recall the last day they saw their daughter. Olga works in a day care, while Riccardo is on disability.
Comfortable by Juárez standards, their two-floor row house sits at the corner of well-tended street. Images of the Virgin Mary and of Monica cover the walls. Outside, the sun has already set behind the dust-blurred sierra that divides Mexico from the US. Nightfall creeps over the city. Dogs bark and a little boy cries out to his playmates.
It was here in this house that Olga last saw her daughter—the evening before she went missing. The next morning, March 26, 2009, Olga awoke to a heavy sense of foreboding. “She was very good,” she says slowly and with difficulty. “She studied at the university and was a bright student. She always got A+ and was highly intelligent.”
According to both Esparzas, Monica was studying business administration and on that morning, was preparing to meet classmates for a “team assignment.” “Both of us knew where she was going but for days before I had been feeling very sad, very heavy somehow. Perhaps it is the sixth sense of a mother but I felt that something bad was going to happen to Monica.”
Unable to articulate a vague sense of dread, Olga let it slide. She never saw her daughter that morning because her job at the daycare centre demanded that she leave early, before her children awoke. But Olga is a loving mother and every day before leaving for work she wrote a note to her daughter. “Little things but so many, that I loved her, that I thought of her always.” But that morning, her message was different. The sense of danger had become a “suffocating” fear. “I wrote to my daughter: take care, don’t trust all of your classmates because they could be bad people.”
Upon arriving at the centre, Olga immediately called home but Riccardo answered. “Please, please, where is Monica? Tell Monica not to go to school today.” But it was too late. Monica was already gone. She had just kissed her father goodbye and left for the university. It would be the last time Riccardo ever saw his daughter.
Later on at 1 pm that same day, when Olga called Monica again, she felt something was deeply wrong. Monica answered but her voice sounded ‘unnatural’ and the normal sounds of a public bus were absent. She was in car with a friend and they were on their way to meet their other classmates. “I asked her to put me on the cell with her friend,” recalls Olga. “Monica said no—that she was a big girl and that her friend, another girl, was trustworthy. I asked her to give me the number of where she was going. She did and then hung up.”
Feeling increasingly agitated, Olga called Monica’s cell again and again but this time it went directly to voicemail. She punched in the number that Monica had given her but a young man answered and said he had neither knew who Monica and her female friend was, or where they could be.
They contacted Monica’s boyfriend but he hadn’t heard from her. In despair and frantic, they waited all night. The next morning Riccardo went down in person to the Fiscalía to report that Monica was missing. The response, he says, was sympathetic. “Monica was a university student so they took me seriously,” he says. “Afterwards though, when months went by, we began to speak to the mothers of girls who had gone missing from other neighborhoods. We learned that the Fiscalía doesn’t care about the poor.”
Olga waited at home. She has been waiting ever since. Like the hundreds of young women before and after her, Monica had vanished, without a trace, into the thin desert air.
***
Merchants of Misery
But where are these girls disappearing to? Many of the parents interviewed for this book note that fewer women are showing up dead in the manner of the 1990 and early parts of this century. They believe that the narco traffickers have taken up an even more lucrative business—that of trafficking girls and young women into the sex trade.
For cartel activity however, is not only confined to illicit drugs—which is another reason why the expansion of the narco trade has disproportionately affected young women and children. According to a US congressional report published in 2012, drugs traffickers have also entered the often more lucrative piracy and trafficking in persons racket—the latter of which has become epidemic throughout Latin America.[44]
As Maynaz states, “you can sell drugs only once, but a girl can be sold over and over again.”[45] These women and girls are not only transported and sold for the purposes of forced prostitution but also to feed an insatiable global appetite for “extreme” porn that features degradation, torture and even murder.[46] One report puts the number of women and girls trafficked from the south of Mexico to the northern border at an estimated 10,000 per year.[47]
It is a Tuesday night and darkness has enveloped the quiet colonía of San Francisco, a short 15-minute bus trip away from the Centro Historico. Since 2009, the neighborhood has been perturbed with strange reports of young women and girls simply vanishing—usually on their way to school, work or to shop along the Calle Velarde, a low-end shopping strip in the Centro Historico. The Centro is also an important transit hub connecting the far-flung colonías with the maquilas and the university. Most of the more recent wave of disappearances involve young women and girls who have gone missing in the middle of the day—running the kinds of mundane errands that, in anywhere but Juárez, wouldn’t typically be a cause for worry or alarm.
Luz Elena Munoz, 38, is small with the distinctive finely arched nose, smooth copper-hued skin and wide mouth characteristic of Mexico’s indigenous population. An uneven path cuts through an unlit construction site that is the only access to her small concrete house.[48]
Inside, her home is sparsely furnished but tidy. The single low-watt fluorescent light bulb that hangs from the living room ceiling casts hollow shadows that partially obscure eyes bright with ready tears. The walls of the living room are adorned with a single enlarged photo of a beautiful young woman. She is attired in the distinctive white of her quinceañera—her 15th birthday party.
Luz Elena’s eldest daughter, Nancy Ivette Navarro Munoz, went missing on July 13, 2011 at the age of 18. Like so many girls before or since, she disappeared while applying for job. There was nothing exceptional about that day, Luz Elena recalls, aside from that it was hot and dusty: Just an ordinary summer afternoon in Juárez.
A day before, she and Nancy spotted a job advertisement on a storefront while riding on a local bus. They took down the number and address, returned home and collected all of the identification and papers necessary to land the much-needed job. Nancy had had a tough time finding work since giving birth to her daughter. “She was determined to give her a good start in life,” says Luz Elena. The next afternoon the entire family accompanied Nancy to the bus stop. When it pulled up, Nancy kissed her mother goodbye, flashed her a broad smile, turned and clambered aboard.
After a few hours passed Luz Elena began to feel a nagging sense of unease. At 5 pm she called Nancy, but the call went directly to voicemail. With a rising sense of panic she punched in the numbers of her brother and sister-in-law. Neither had seen Nancy that day. Luz Elena gathered her children and granddaughter together and went to the shop where Nancy had applied for work. It was closed and the advertisement for staff taken down. “She never arrived home,” Luz Elena says. “We looked for her everywhere.”
Children in tow, Luz Elena then tried the Fiscalía. Despite Juárez’s reputation and the high number of missing and murdered women, the police insisted she wait the requisite 24-hours before filing a missing persons report. The family returned to the shop where Nancy was supposed to have applied for work. The owner insisted that he had never seen Nancy that day. They then printed up ‘noticias’ and posted them everywhere they could think. Someone took them all down. Luz Elena returned to the Fiscalía where she and her ex-husband were forced to wait three hours to file the report.
“The police decided to focus on our family instead of the store owner,” she says. “They told us they went to the store but we saw the police file and they never did. They never did anything that we didn’t instigate ourselves. We learned that this is how they treat those of us who are poor—we are the criminals and the ones who steal our daughters cannot be touched. They told us she ran away with a boyfriend but she didn’t have one. She would never have left her daughter.”
About a month after Nancy’s disappearance, Luz Elena began to receive “tormenting phone calls”—threats too vile to repeat she says. A few weeks later Elena Luz received a text message that left her speechless. The number was unfamiliar. She showed it to the police but “they didn’t care. They did nothing.”
The text message read, “Mama take care of my daughter. I’m with a man whose mission is to capture girls and take them to Durango and Monterrey. He forces us to have sex with many men.”
That was it. Nothing else. Like Olga and Riccardo, Luz Elena is waiting for her daughter to come home.
***
Metastatic Femicide and Its Security Implications
As stated earlier however, the femicides are no longer confined to Juárez. Since the 1990s the scourge has spread not only throughout Mexico, but throughout Central America. Commentators blame the rise of the narco state, increasing militarization and impunity. When one travels to the crowded neighborhoods that lap up against Mexico City, for example, it is hard to avoid the hundreds of posters of missing women attached to poles, cement block walls, store fronts and painted on the sides of houses. Few families have been untouched by the wave of violence engulfing the country’s women.
“The justice system is simply not working for women and girls,” says Margarita Guille, Executive Co-ordinator of Inter-American Network of Women’s Shelters. “From 2006 to now we’ve seen increases in triple digits of women throughout central American being killed owing to the introduction of weapons, and the militarization of our streets and roads.”[49]
Dr. Rosa Maria Salazar Rivera, Director of Red Nacional De Refugios, says, femicide is of concern because the numbers of murdered women killed with extreme brutality in Central America and Mexico has more than doubled since 2003—a fact the Global Burden of Armed Violence 2011 report confirms.[50] As usual, a paucity of accurate accounting, as well difficulties gathering sex disaggregated data and cause of death, makes real numbers hard to gauge. Report authors state however, that, as Bowden and Molloy also contend, that the murder rate of women tracks the rise of criminal and gang-related violence, which they note, “implies some connection between these different forms of violence.”[51] Journalist Edward Fox concurs: “the sharp rise in the killings over the last decade has coincided with a period in which the region has become the principal trafficking corridor for US-bound narcotics. The correlation cannot be ignored.”[52]
His observations are corroborated by a UN Women report which states that Mexico has seen a steady increase in the numbers of femicides since 2007—a number that also tracks the overall murder rate, which has soared in the wake of Mexico’s “war on drugs.”[53]
Salazar Rivera maintains that the rise of femicide throughout Central America spills over into other countries, such as further south into Colombia. It is a cancer that has metastasized, weakening the foundations not only of societies, but also of states, as we have seen in Mexico.
We can even find the traces of this “unraveling” reaching US cities like Chicago, where the DEA says the city has turned into a “Mexican border town.” Three major Mexican cartels have been battling in Chicago, with the murder rate reaching two per day. Commentators further note, “Chicago’s problem is turning into a Midwest problem, with tentacles of the cartels spreading drugs and violence into Milwaukee, Indianapolis, St. Louis, and Detroit.”[54] Far from something to be ignored, we argue that a heavily-armed militarized mafia state located on its very borders poses a more serious threat to the United States than that of faraway Afghanistan—a threat that belies the lack of attention paid by the US Congress and the American media.
Where the gangs take root, femicidal “narco-culture” follows. “Narco culture” as it is known, is predicated on an almost burlesque interpretation of what it means to be man—i.e. brutal, murderous, controlling, paranoid, chauvinistic, rapacious and devoid of mercy.
“With rage there is a sense of being in control,” says Neil Boyd, a Vancouver-based criminologist with Simon Fraser University.[55] His book The Beast Within: Why Men are Violent attempts to explain in a more ‘general’ sense why 98 percent of all violent crimes are committed by men and in particular, why men harm and kill women. “We tend to brainwash boys into associating anger with being in control. You are a tough person. You are taking on the world, telling it like it is: controlling things that just need to be controlled.”[56] As we have seen, the first testing ground for this strategy is the control of women.
Integral to the increasing numbers of disappeared and murdered women is the drugs, arms and human trafficking trades—all of which tend to be dominated by the same large transnational crime networks. For example, Mexican authorities suggest “a possible link between the Ciudad Juarez murders and international money-laundering, prostitution, pornographic and pedophile rings that use modeling agencies, Internet cafes, and computer education schools as covers.”[57]
It is no coincidence, then, that the annihilation of the feminine is part and parcel of both narco-culture and militarism in Mexico, the country heir to the Aztec State and its misogynist worldview. Both narco-culture and militarism promulgate the notion that ‘might makes right’ and those who are physically weaker, impoverished or otherwise vulnerable are objects to be plundered at will and with full impunity. Thus it makes perverse sense that the Zetas were formerly Mexican Special Forces soldiers, and that Mexican gangs are now hiring American soldiers to be their hit men. Deborah Hastings of the New York Daily News reports, “The most recent FBI statistics show that 53 gangs have been identified with members who have served in or are affiliated with the U.S. military. Those gangs include MS 13, Latin Kings, Crips, Bloods and Barrio Azteca, some of the most notorious and nefarious outlaw groups operating in the U.S. and Mexico.”[58]
Indeed, what better way to control a population than to instill a sense of helplessness and fear in the face of extreme violence and nearly 100 percent impunity for acts of brutality against women and girls? The bodies of women and girls serve simultaneously as training ground for those involved and message to those who are not. In a way, though, this confluence of extreme violence and femicide also implies a counter-intuitive fear . . .the fear that women, if empowered, will overturn the forces of militarization and the unfettered corporate ravaging of cheap resources; that their influence will undermine hegemonic notions of masculinity—another reason why the persecution of gay and lesbians closely tracks that of women and women’s rights activists.
Furthermore, cultural norms that extol the annihilation of the female are also spreading beyond Mexican borders as the gangs themselves become a transnational force. Central America’s Maras for example, first established themselves in Los Angeles. Many were the offspring of traumatized refugees fleeing the dirty wars of the 1980s from El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras—where violence against women was part and parcel of the governments’ counterinsurgency (COIN) strategy. The ‘hyper masculinity’ that these groups promulgated could have been ripped straight from the pages of a paramilitary group. Terrorize the women and you control the neighborhood; destroy the ability of women to organize and you own society.
In common with the research findings of Valerie M. Hudson and Andrea Den Boer, Boyd believes that in Mexico—and those countries like it—the wholesale contempt for all things feminine provides the accelerant for the conditions under which male violence flourishes. He says that is “no surprise” that a country like Norway for example, not only scores top of the UNDP Development and Gender Index, but also has among the lowest violent crime rates in the world. “Where there is gender equality, there are fewer people in jail. One of the strongest markers of the extent to which violent crime exist the number of prisons. Countries that have higher levels of gender equality have lower violence rates, which also means fewer prisons.”[59]
If there was ever a region needing an American foreign policy approach grounded in the Hillary Doctrine, we would nominate Mexico and Central America as a priority—which is arguably not at this time. Nevertheless, there is some evidence the Hillary Doctrine has influenced aid programming for these areas—as witnessed by the US-funded Women’s Justice Center in Chihuahua. Mexican women were also encouraged by Hillary Clinton’s decision to bestow the 2011 International Women of Courage Award on Maricela Morales, the first female Mexican attorney general.[60]
Nevertheless, during her four years as Secretary of States, Clinton remained publicly silent about the issue of femicide in her visits to Mexico, deeply disappointing activists there.[61] As Nobel Peace Prize laureates Rigoberta Menchu Tum and Jody Williams have expressed it, “The war on drugs in Mexico, Honduras, and Guatemala has become a war on women.”[62] American foreign policy towards this region will not see success until we are willing to “Know” why this is. The situation is so bad that in certain regions of Mexico, armed all-female vigilante groups have taken to escorting children to and from school.[63]
It is time for deep reflection in Washington when women on the ground make the following observations: “There has been an increase in military spending and a rise in femicides. It should be the other way around in theory—more spending, more security. But ‘citizen security’ throughout Central America has meant more death for women.”[64] Since the United States is supplying most of that increase in military spending, it bears at least some responsibility for what it has wrought for women.
***
Farewell to Juárez
As of this writing, the US and Canadian governments have declared much of Mexico—Guerrero, Coahuila, Durango, Nuevo León, Sinaloa (with the exception of Mazatlán), Sonora and Tamaulipas—as “highly dangerous” owing to the increasing power of the organized crime cartels. Chihuahua is, as usual, is foremost on the list, which grows ever longer as Mexico morphs from a country with an organized crime “problem” to a full blown mafia state.
Just below the Cristo Negro, on Lomo Poleo, one can drive up and watch the sun setting behind the mountains to the west of Juárez. As it sinks below the horizon and darkness spreads from the east, the lights of the city blink on one-by-one. Along a ditch eight pink crosses are the only reminders of the women whose young lives ended here.
Barbed wire fences newly erected by the four powerful families who own this lonely and desolate place—among them the powerful Fuentes clan—divide the vast expanse of land atop this hill. Behind, lie the foundations of a house where the departed likely drew their last breaths.
On its walls, those who many believe were the perpetrators scrawled obscene pictures of sexual torture. A group of searchers looking for missing girls stumbled upon the house while on one of their forays into the desert. They also reported the presence of what appeared to be a blood stained ‘altar.’ Soon after they alerted the police, “unknown persons” knocked it down before a proper crime scene investigation could be undertaken.[65]
A chill breeze rustles the desiccated limbs of the sagebrush and whispers among the dry grass. But the dead yield no secrets. Somewhere, somebody knows what happened here. They may be long dead, in jail, on the lam or living in El Paso: They may enjoying a fine meal in Miami or rubbing shoulders with powerful elites in far away Mexico City.
In the distance, a cock crows. Night has come to Mexico—but nobody knows how long it will last.
[1] On January 20, 2013, Patricia Leidl met with Dr. Hernández Cárdenas in Ciudad Juárez. The following story is an account of their encounter, and all quotations are from that interview.
[2] Karla Zabludovsky, “Doctor’s Bath for Corpses reinvigorates Cold Cases,” New York Times, October 15, 2012, accessed March 18, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/16/world/americas/mexican-doctors-bath-for-corpses-reinvigorates-cold-cases.html.
[3] United Nations Development Programme, “The Rise of the South: Human Progress in a Diverse World,” 2013 Human Development Report, 2013, accessed September 15, 2013, http://hdrstats.undp.org/images/explanations/MEX.pdf.
[4] Dr. Rosa Maria Salazar Rivera, interview with Patricia Leidl, Mexico City, Mexico, February 2, 2013. All information attributed to Dr. Rosa Maria Salazar Rivera in the remainder of this chapter was collected during the February 2, 2013 interview.
[5] Elizabeth M. Brumfiel, “Aztec Women: Capable Partners and Cosmic Enemies,” in The Aztec World, ed. Gary M. Feinman (New York: Abrams, 2008).
[6] Nevertheless, at the time of the conquest, Aztec women (at least those who were not slaves) still enjoyed a greater degree of freedom than their European counterparts: They attended school, owned land, participated equally as temple devotees and priestesses, worked as merchants and as market administrators and inherited from their mothers (sons inherited from their father)—a system known as parallel inheritance.
In Spain meanwhile, women remained little more than property with next to no agency. In 15th century Hispaniola, women and girls were subject to the caprice of their husbands, fathers, brothers, uncles, cousins and sons. They could neither inherit, own land nor participate in public life unless—like Columbus’s patroness Queen Isabella of Spain—no male heir could be found.
[7] An ironic contrast to the Spaniards who revered and prayed to the Virgin Mary (who of course, had never sullied her body with anything so base as sex).
[8] Because of space constraints, this chapter cannot examine the plethora of belief systems that characterized the highly diverse population of coastal and central Mexico. We focus instead on the Aztec Empire, which extended up to the borders of what is now the US and down to the northern quarter Guatemala.
[9] Jane Caputi, “Goddess Murder and Gynocide in Ciudad Juárez,” in Making a Killing: Femicide, Free Trade and La Frontera, ed. Alicia Gaspar de Alba and Georgina Guzman (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010).
[10] David Carrasco, City of Sacrifice: The Aztec Empire and the Role of Violence in Civilization (Boston: Beacon Press, 1999), 71.
[11] Some scholars aver that the original Coyolxauhqui was attempting to warn her mother away from a bad match.
[12] Caputi, “Goddess Murder and Gynocide in Ciudad Juárez.”
[13] Brumfiel, “Aztec Women.”
[14] Caputi, “Goddess Murder and Gynocide in Ciudad Juárez.”
[15] Oscar Maynaz, interview with Patricia Leidl, Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, January 21, 2013.
[16] Nancy Jay, Throughout Your Generations Forever: Sacrifice, Religion and Paternity (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992).
[17] Jane Caputi, “Goddess Murder and Gynocide.”
[18] Eduardo Cabrera Ruiz, “Mexico’s Cancer: Domestic Violence, A Virtual License to Kill,” Yucatan Times, August 17, 2011, accessed September 15, 2013, http://www.theyucatantimes.com/2011/08/mexicos-cancer-domestic-violence-a-virtual-license-to-kill/.
[19] Laura Carlsen, “Women Human Rights Defenders in Mexico Face Threats, Violence,” Americas Program, December 14, 2011, accessed September 15, 2013, http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/5818.
[20] Catherine E. Shoichet, “Mexico Reports More Than 26,000 Missing,” CNN, February 27, 2013, accessed November 14, 2013, http://www.cnn.com/2013/02/26/world/americas/mexico-disappeared/index.html.
[21] “Mexican Women Activists at Risk after Fleeing Death Threats,” Amnesty International, March 17, 2011, accessed September 14, 2013, http://www.amnesty.org/en/news-and-updates/mexican-women-activists-risk-after-fleeing-death-threats-2011-03-17.
[22] Marietta Messmer, “Transfrontera Crimes: Representations of the Juárez Femicides in Recent Fictional and Non-Fictional Accounts,” American Studies Journal 57 (2012), accessed September 14, 2013, http://www.asjournal.org/archive/57/202.html.
[23] Maynaz, interview.
[24] Nick Valencia and Arturo Chacon, “Juarez Shedding Violent Image, Statistics Show,” CNN.com, January 5, 2013, accessed September 14, 2013, http://www.cnn.com/2013/01/05/world/americas/mexico-juarez-killings-drop/index.html.
[25] Kristin M. Finklea, Southwest Border Violence: Issues in Identifying and Measuring Spillover Violence, CRS Report R41075 (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, Research Service, February 28, 2013).
[26] Hector Hawley Morelos (Crime Scene Investigator, Special Department for murdered women in state of Chihuahua), in discussion with Patricia Leidl, Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, January 20, 2013.
[27] Lydia Cristina Huerta Moreno, “Affecting Violence: Narratives of Los Feminicidios and their Ethical and Political Reception” (doctoral thesis, University of Texas at Austin, 2012), http://repositories.lib.utexas.edu/bitstream/handle/2152/19473/HUERTAMORENO-DISSERTATION-2012.pdf?sequence=1.
[28] Ursula Biemann, “Performing the Border: On Gender, Transnational Bodies, and Technology,” in Globalization on the Line: Culture, Capital, and Citizenship at U.S. Borders, ed. Claudia Sadowski-Smith (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002).
[29] Viviana Giacaman and Mariclaire Acosta, “Protecting Journalists and Human Rights Defenders in Mexico,” Freedom House, Policy Brief, November 30, 2012, accessed March 20, 2013, http://www.freedomhouse.org/article/protecting-journalists-and-human-rights-defenders-mexico.
[30] Sergio Rodriguez-Gonzalez, interview with Patricia Leidl, Mexico City, Mexico, January 30, 2013.
[31] Ibid.
[32] Ibid.
[33] Ibid.
[34] In response to the outcry caused by what many saw as a questionable and indeed perverse deviation from good taste, Mac said it will donate all global profits from the limited-edition make-up line to a “newly created initiative to raise awareness and provide on-the-ground support to the women and girls in Juarez.”
[35] Rohry Benitiz et al., El Silencio que la vos de todos quiebra: Mujeres y victimas de Ciudad Juarez (Chihuahua: Editciones El Azar, 1999).
[36] The excellent 2011 anthology Making a Killing: Femicide, Free Trade and La Frontera represents one of the most comprehensive and complete series of analyses of the Juarez femicides. Edited and compiled by Alicia Gasper de Alba with Georgine Guzman it provides a more detailed chronology of the botched investigations into the Juarez murders than can be undertaken here.
[37] Diana Washington Valdez and Aileen B. Flores, “Court Blasts Mexico for Juarez Women’s Murders,” El Paso Times, December 12, 2010, accessed March 21, 2013, http://www.elpasotimes.com/news/ci_13981319.
[38] Ibid.
[39] Lourdes Cardenas, “Juárez Opens Justice Center for Women” El Paso Times, March 29, 2012, accessed September 27, 2013, http://www.elpasotimes.com/news/ci_20276981/ju-225-rez-opens-justice-center-women.
[40] Five-year-old Alma Mireya Chavirria Farel’s was discovered on January 23, 1993, making her the first documented victim of the Juárez serial murders. She was discovered with severe lacerations across her chest, had been sexually assaulted and then strangled in the same manner of subsequent victims.
[41] Jesse Hyde, “The ‘Broken Windows’ Theory Worked in Juarez,” The Atlantic, March 26, 2013, accessed September 14, 2013, http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/03/the-broken-windows-theory-worked-in-juarez/274379/.
[42] Alicia Elena Pérez Duarte y Noroña, interview with Patricia Leidl, Mexico City, Mexico, January 20, 2013.
[43] Alicia Elena Pérez Duarte y Noroña, interview.
[44] Clare R. Seelke, Trafficking in Persons in Latin America and the Caribbean, Congressional Research Service, July 15, 2013, accessed September 15, 2013, www.fas.org/sgp/crs/row/RL33200.pdf.
[45] Maynaz, interview.
[46] Seelke, Trafficking in Persons.
[47] Arun Kumar Acharya, “Tráfico de Mujeres Hacia la Zona Metropolitana de Monterrey: Una Perspectiva Analítica,” Espacios Públicos 12, no. 24 (2009).
[48] The account of Luz Elena and her family was conveyed to the author during an interview between Leidl and Elena in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico on February 13, 2013. All quotations from Elena throughout the remainder of the chapter are from that interview.
[49] Margarita Guille, interview with Patricia Leidl, Mexico City, Mexico, January 30, 2013.
[50] Rivera, interview; Geneva Declaration of Armed Violence and Development, Global Burden of Armed Violence 2011, 2011, accessed June 5, 2013, http://www.genevadeclaration.org/en/measurability/global-burden-of-armed-violence/global-burden-of-armed-violence-2011.html.
[51] Geneva Declaration, Global Burden, 33-34.
[52] Edward Fox, “How the Drug Trade Fuels Femicide in Central America,” In Sight Crime, July 12, 2012, accessed September 27, 2013, http://www.insightcrime.org/news-analysis/how-the-drug-trade-fuels-femicide-in-central-america.
[53] Mesoamerican Initiative of Women Human Rights Defenders, “Femicide and Impunity in Mexico: A Context of Structural and Genearlized Violence,” report presented before the Committee on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women, CEDAW, 52nd Session, New York, July 17, 2012, accessed May 23, 2013, http://cmdpdh.org/english/?p=1442.
[54] “Mexican Cartel Drug War Adding to Chicago Violence,” YouTube video, 3:02, from a CBS News report, posted by “CBSNewsOnline,” August 23, 2012, accessed September 27, 2013, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdYitRcQp4E.
[55] Neil Boyd, interview with Patricia Leidl, Vancouver, Canada, July 7, 2013; See also Neil Boyd, The Beast Within: Why Men are Violent (Vancouver: Greystone Books, 2000).
[56] Boyd, interview.
[57] Kent Paterson, “Femicide on the Rise in Latin America,” Global Politician, March 10, 2006, accessed September 27, 2013, http://www.globalpolitician.com/default.asp?21654-latin-america-feminism/.
[58] Deborah Hastings, “U.S. Soldiers Accepting Cash, Drugs for Mexican Drug Cartel Contract Hits,” New York Daily News, September 13, 2013, accessed September 27, 2013, http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/drug-cartels-mexico-hire-u-s-soldiers-assassins-article-1.1454851.
[59] Boyd, interview.
[60] Daniela Pastrana, “Mexican Women march for Rights, Mourn Slain Activists,” Inter Press Service, April 12, 2011, accessed September 15, 2013, http://www.ipsnews.net/2011/04/mexican-women-march-for-rights-mourn-slain-activists/.
[61] Ulyssa’s Blog, “Why Secretary Clinton Can’t Mention Femicide in Juarex, Mexican Bordertowns,” BraveHeart Women (blog), March 23, 2010, accessed September 15, 2013, http://www.braveheartwomen.com/blog-entry/Ulyssas-Blog/Secretary-Clinton-Mention/13000046525.
[62] Nobel Women’s Initiative and Just Associates, From Survivors to Defenders: Women Confronting Violence in Mexico, Honduras, and Guatemala, NWI Delegation report, June 5, 2012, accessed September 27, 2013, http://nobelwomensinitiative.org/2012/06/from-survivors-to-defenders-women-confronting-violence-in-mexico-honduras-and-guatemala/.
[63] See, for example, Katie Orlinsky, “Mexico’s Female Vigilante Squads,” The Daily Beast, October 5, 2013, accessed November 14, 2013, http://www.thedailybeast.com/witw/articles/2013/10/05/mexico-s-female-vigilantes-take-justice-and-safety-into-their-own-hands.html.
[64] Quoted in ibid.
[65] Daniela Paniagua, “Ciudad Juárez: An Untold History of Femicide and Violence in the Western Hemisphere,” Examiner, March 20, 2010, accessed June 26, 2013, http://www.examiner.com/article/ciudad-ju-rez-an-untold-history-of-femicide-and-violence-the-western-hemisphere.
